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Abstract

The UCSD Libraries User Survey was designed to have its results in
machine-readable form. Library management, anticipating the need for
detailed statistics for future decision making, required that the survey
results be manipulatable by library managers. To accomplish this goal,
the survey had to be designed in a particular way and subsequently,
programming skills were needed to create an interactive website. The
results allow individual responses to be considered against a number of
variables including but not limited to gender, year in school and major
for students; department and years at the university for faculty. Branch
managers can review answers dealing specifically with their services or
operations. More importantly, for the first time ever, this type of data
is available on the individual's desktop allowing universal access for
anyone interested in the information. Plans call for a repeat of this
survey in the future, but the 1996 UCSD Libraries User Survey solicited
responses from three categories of primary users: undergraduates,
graduate students, and faculty.

Discussion

In 1995 as part of a larger undertaking of organizational change, the UCSD
Libraries decided to conduct a user survey of its primary clientele--
faculty, students and staff. Subsequently, a nine member library-wide
user survey team and a consultant from the business community were
empowered to administer the entire process.

The process took the better part of a year and in the end we had survey
results in machine-readable form. It was the intent of library management
that this numeric data be used by library department heads and unit
managers in making future managerial decisions.

In the last weeks of the survey process, the Libraries User Survey Team
involved members of the Data Services Group in the project. The original
request to the Data Services Group was for assistance in housing and
archiving the data, providing access to it, and most importantly,
according sub-setting capabilities by primary library.

The simplest solution to all our requests, would have involved putting
the data files on the web in ASCII format. The Data Services group
however, chose to go beyond this simple implementation by providing the
same functionality for the survey data that it provides in its
other web-based data projects. They welcomed the opportunity to show-case
new and enhanced retrieval powers and ease-of-use features. Additionally,
they wanted to meet the needs of library managers whose specific branch
level questions could not be answered in sufficient detail by the
pre-formatted charts and tables already available on the User Survey
Website (http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/survey/).
To that end, they expanded the project's definition to include the
following: interactive query-based access from WWW forms, formatted
tables, analytical functionality including cross-tabs and graphing, and
lastly, data file format export capabilities.

Interactive Access and Analysis of Data via the WWW

Server-side analysis of data is a new feature that the Data Services group is providing with some web-based data projects. Traditionally the library has provided the data expecting the end-users to do their own analysis (client-side analysis). Given that we can not anticipate all the analysis needs users will have this is still the most important role for Data Services. Taking advantage of the tools available for the WWW and current computing technologies this traditional service has been expanded to provide limited interactive analysis capabilities (server-side analysis). Server-side analysis allows users the ability to answer simple data questions quickly and easily as well as providing data exploration tools to those users who have more complex questions. In the long run we believe that these features will result in greater access to our data collection.

Design of HTML Forms

The Library User Survey data sets included a relatively small number of variables that were well documented by the consultant. This allowed us the luxury of turning the codebooks into the HTML query forms and freeing us from spending a lot of time developing the user-interface. The codebooks included the text of the questions creating simple, user-friendly interfaces from which to make interactive queries.

SAS data sets were created for each group surveyed from SAS export files provided by the consultant. Two HTML forms
are available for each data set. The {Analyze/ChartData} form provides server-side analysis features where charts and tables are created on-the-fly. The {Download/Subset} menu can be used to subset the data for client-side analysis with spreadsheet or statistical software.

The
Analyze & Chart Data menus require a primary analysis
variable preselected from the table below. Part II of the menus allows the
user to select one variable from any in the dataset to compare against the
primary variable.

Variable names and values are embedded into the forms using the
input tag as

<input type=radio name=keep value=hours>Library hours

When the submit button is pressed the CGI program
will be called with the browser passing to it the selected variable
names and values. The program will extract the data from the SAS
data set and output a chart and table comparing the two variables.

Output Files

Analysis Menu (Server-side analysis)

The output from the Analysis Menu displays a graphic
comparison of the two variables as well as a table representing
the numeric values and percentages of the two variables selected
by the user.

{Output charts and tables} are quickly and easily available through the intra/internet to administrators and public service providers within the library. They can be used to answer simple questions or to be printed and included in sreports.

Subset menu (Client-side analysis)

Output files created from the subset menu reside
on the server's disk for approximately one-half hour. Export files
are available through FTP links that are output to the browser
and have specific extension names. With proper configuration of
the user's browser these files can be launched directly into spreadsheet
and statistical programs. Otherwise they can be downloaded to
disk (without actually being read by the browser) and then
read into the appropriate software program.

An HTML link to a formatted ASCII table of the numeric
data in a human-readable form is also provided.

Programming

The CGI program called by all of the Survey HTML
forms is written in PERL. It calls the SAS data
engine which subsets and extracts the data from the SAS
data sets. SAS functions are called to cross-tab, format
and chart the results. Export functionality is provided
through the add-on product DBMS Copy.

The CGI and SAS scripts being used for data access are still evolving.
The Library Survey data project provided a simple, elegant set of data to
work with to add to our library of routines. Many of the routines used had
already been developed for earlier projects allowing us to develop this
system in a short period of time. The routines developed for the Library
Survey have proved very useful in more recent development projects such as
{The General Social Survey.}

Data Applications

Once the Data Services group completed its work, all library managers and
staff were encouraged to review the survey results. Much of the overall
general information seemed to confirm comments that had been received via
the suggestion box, ie., the temperature of the building was too cold.
Specific operational units, however, found the detailed statistics to be
most useful. Operations like Inter-library loan and Library Express now
had detailed insights to specific patron needs and concerns. It is beyond
the scope of this presentation to describe specific UCSD responses to the
survey. The authors have instead chosen to illustrate using survey data as
a process of decision making by a hypothetical branch manager.

A
management issue: Library Hours

All libraries today are
struggling with the issue of library hours. Except for a few academic
institutions that are able to keep their libraries open around the clock,
most of us provide less than 24 hours per day of access to building
collections. In one student focus group we conducted, we learned that our
undergraduates wanted library buildings to be open longer hours,
preferably into the early hours of the morning. Since our campus has nine
library branches, satisfying this particular user request would not be
simple or cheap.

Keeping library buildings open longer involves more than just paying an
additional heating or lighting bill. Even if services are scaled to a
minimum, additional staff is needed to insure the safety and security of
patrons in very large buildings. The vigilance provided by library staff
during the day, is not available nights and hence many libraries hire
additional security staff. This added staffing need means more payroll
dollars. Even if our branch managers wanted to keep their buildings open
later, they could not make that decision without understanding the budgetary impact of such a move.

In addition to the fiscal issue, there are numerous other questions to be
asked. Do we need to keep all the buildings open longer or is it possible
to satisfy this request by extending the hours at only one building? Was
this an issue for graduate students as well? Maybe more importantly, did
the faculty want longer hours at specific branches?

It is at this stage that the work done by the Data Services Group
becomes invaluable and directly applicable. By retrieving the answers to
survey questions provided by our three user groups (undergraduate,
graduate /SOM, and faculty ) the library manager can determine which
branch libraries are candidates for a change in hours.

One of the best quantified survey results, indicates that the majority
of our undergraduates use libraries as places to study.

The graph immediately above indicates library usage on the average of
once per week for all branches except IRPS (International
Relations/Pacific Studies) and Special Collections. That is consistent
with the fact that the IRPS library has as its primary users, graduate
students and faculty. Special Collections on our campus is primarily an
archive and a rare book collection rather than a normal study space for
students. The heaviest used study libraries appear to be the science
libraries: the Science & Engineering, the BioMedical library, and the
Scripps Institute of Oceanography Library.

By combining the fuchsia bar (once a wk) with the green bar
(once every 2-3 wks), one can see that better than
eighty percent of the sampled students study in campus libraries
regularly . The fact that a very small percentage of
students never study at UGL (the Undergraduate Library) is interesting
since all undergraduate reserves are housed at UGL. It may
be because many UCSD classes now have students purchasing class
readers [a compilation of photocopies articles]
rather than placing materials on reserve.

The graph below shows that more than one half of
the sophomores, juniors and seniors study at a library once
a week (fuchsia bar). This data supports the information in
the previous graph that students are making heavy use of UCSD
libraries as places to study.

Now that the question about whether students are really using the
library is clearly established, the branch manager needs to document the
request for longer hours.

Running a data analysis on the Undergraduate population against the
choice of longer hours on the question of which future service or resource
they wanted the UCSD libraries to offer, gives us the following table.

The most obvious thing about this chart is the overall dominance of the
blue bar indicating that longer hours was not one of the top three choices
for a large percentage of students. The green bar (indicating a ranking
of 1, hence of highest priority) is the next largest response.

Since the issue of library hours had come up in focus group discussions
and in early survey design sessions, the consultant specifically decided
to ask a "which longer library hours" question on the survey. The
students were asked to choose all that applied; longer library hours:
weekdays, longer library hours: weekends, longer library hours: holidays.
The next three graphs show their answers.

{Tables of hour preferences} by weekday, weekend and holiday.
[http://ssdc.ucsd.edu/mmf/libex/week.html]

The request for longer weekday hours applies to all branches with the
exception of Special Collections and IRPS (International Relations/Pacific
Studies) which is consistent with what we already know. The last graph
shows that students want longer weekend hours at all the branches with the
exception of IRPS.

And what was the students response regarding longer holiday hours.?
Well at least this is clear. Students, no more than staff, want to come
to the library on holidays.

Now that the issue of library hours is well documented in terms of the
Undergraduates, are these opinions shared by graduate students and
faculty. It will certainly be easier for branch managers to make a case
for increasing library hours if they can be shown that all three primary
user groups provided the same feedback.

The graph below shows the graduate students and faculty responses on
longer library hours. This table does not tell us the reason for these
responses but clearly the faculty and graduate students are not in
agreement with the undergraduates.

This is certainly a problem for making a case for longer library hours.
The larger question however is why the difference between these
groups.

Now granted, faculty don't study at the library and with electronic
access and document delivery (called Library Express on our campus),
perhaps they no longer come to the library. But surely, graduate students
must be studying in the library. After some serious review of the survey
data, additional clues about faculty and graduate student use of the
library comes to light.

The two graphs below shows the frequency with which the UCSD faculty
access libraries from their home or office. The first graph indicates
frequency of usage by various titles and the second one is by their
department.

The first graph suggests that faculty at the lower ranks don't access
the library electronically as often as their seniors. Now this data
doesn't tell us why, but we could speculate that it might be because their
don't have the resources either in the offices or at home. The fact that
better than 50 percent of the Associate Professors log in 2 or more times
a week is interesting. Taking the three professional ranks together, it's
quite amazing at how actively our faculty access the library. This is
information library managers did not know prior to the survey being taken.
If a large number of faculty access the library remotely, then it makes
sense that library hours are not a major issue for this group.

The second graph shows the information from a different point of view.
It's quite apparent that graduate students and faculty using the CMRR
Library and Special Collection don't have an issue with library hours.
CMRR is the Center for Magnetic Recording a library facility used
primarily by faculty and researchers. It would appear however, that
percent of the polled faculty from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
and those who primarily using the Art and Architecture library, would like
longer hours.

Does this suggest that faculty never come into the library any more?
Not at all. When you combine the more than 2 times per week with the once
a week percentiles in the graph, it shows that better than one half of the
faculty still visit in person every week. From our knowledge of library
patron behavior, it would be easy to assume that a fair number of quick
look-ups are now done on-line (instead of calling the reference desk) and
trips to the library are reserved for larger and more complex needs. If
such library usage by faculty is an increase over previous years, we do
not know that at this time. The 1996 survey will be our benchmark for
future data gathering.

So how did graduate students and students in the School of Medicine
use the library and did they want longer hours?
The tables below show the answers.

It appears that graduate students in all disciplines use the library frequently. Adding the fuchsia line with the green line indicates that better than 50 percent use the library weekly.

Conclusions

The user survey information available to our hypothetical branch manager as a result of our 1996 efforts, has provided a sufficient amount of information to make recommendations to the library administration. For the first time every, he/she has the
hard data to substantiate the need to increase library hours at specific branches. Even better, this information was easily obtainable from their own desktop.

Dillman, Don A. 1978. Mail and Telephone Surveys: The Total
DesignModel. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Frey, Thomas K. 1995. Undergraduate Perceptions of Library
Service: Use of Focus Groups and Surveys in Strategic Planning. In:
Continuity & Transformation The Promise of Confluence: Proceedings
of the Seventh National Conference of the Association of College and
Research Libraries. (ed. by Richard AmRhein) pp. 41-50. ACRL,
Chicago, Il.

Kirk, R. 1995. What Do Our Readers Want? Some Conclusions from a
Survey Made at Leicester University: An Education Library Slant.
Education Libraries Journal 38(1): 5-16.